As Nambu gets closer to finishing its private beta with a new 2.0 re-release in late February, I will be releasing a series of articles here over the next month or so highlighting some real concerns that I have for the future of micro-blogging as it exists today on Twitter: 1) the never-ending fail whales; 2) a permanently lame new user experience and stagnant acqusition of new users; 3) Twitter’s open endorsement of selected members of its ecosystem; and 4) spam. For today, it is spam.

Twitter is about sharing thoughts, pictures, links, personal happenings and ideas in a new cool way with random people. But that Twitter is now evolving into a voluntary spam network, a cheap social-networked version of the Home Shopping Network, where all of us will be forced to choose between using Twitter and consuming spam, or ignoring Twitter altogether.

Let’s start at the beginning. I define Twitter spam loosely: anything that is an unsolicited offer from anyone to buy something. It is an interruption, pointless noise, and offensive, just as it is in email.

With email, though, I don’t have any relationship with the people sending me spam. They don’t also send me regular emails that I want to read and possibly respond to. Because of that, very effective systems have evolved to hide email spam automatically based on a simple concept: forever block them and/or any matching message content. And so we almost never see email spam anymore.

With Twitter this problem is much more insidious since you can’t follow Twitter as an aggregate stream without consuming its spam. This is best illustrated with an example. Take, as that example, recent tweets from Chris Messina, a technologist at Google that I have never met, but know of and respect from afar. He has about 20,000 followers or so, a huge number for the vast majority. Mr. Messina would normally tweet about cool industry stuff that is important for me to learn of and keep tabs on. But now he also tweets ads, such as this, or this. He spams me.

So there is the problem. I simply can’t follow Chris Messina anymore because I won’t accept the implicit agreement to consume his spam in exchange for receiving the desired technology-related or personal tweets. As I write this I have officially unfollowed Chris Messina, been forced to do so, but only to not see spam. I want to follow him, now can’t, and Twitter’s overall value to me has decreased.

Sadly, the impact does not end there. Because of the way Twitter implemented Lists, combined with the lack of a proper user-blocking implementation, his spam appears within almost any significant Twitter List that others have created to follow the Internet technology industry. A majority of the the Lists that I am interested in following are infected with his spam, or from others doing the same thing. They ruin Lists. Twitter further enables spammers to reach us, and provides us no reasonable and portable mechanism to silence them (perhaps intentionally). The more followers these spammers have the more Lists they are added to.

But the much larger question that concerns me as a product developer currently focusing on social messaging is this: if I am on Twitter, in the Internet industry, and can’t follow fellow technologists like Chris Messina because they spam me, what is the point of being on Twitter at all?

I see inherent, personally endorsed spam as the single largest problem facing Twitter today, looming very ominously on the horizon.

Services like Ad.ly (aka Spamly) and Sponsored Tweets are openly and without shame eroding the integrity of the network completely, with no suggestion that Twitter is concerned whatsoever. Ad.ly openly brags that they “connect top-tier twitterers with top tier brands,” code for people with lots of followers getting together to spam the other 99.5% of Twitter, people without significant follower counts. But for every user they seduce into their spam network they inversely reduce the value of Twitter as a whole, just as Chris Messina has done.

Ad.ly (and its kind) destroys the reasoning behind why we follow each other entirely. If someone I follow spams me, then they don’t really value their (however small) connection to me at all, beyond the revenue they can generate from it. They don’t really value Twitter for what it is supposed to be. They just don’t care. A relative handful of people with the most followers are trending toward compromising the usefulness of the entire network for everyone.

Rationing the number of spam tweets is an attempt to just rationalize spamming. Perhaps I am overstating it? One or two spams every day from even 10-15% of the people I follow will completely destroy the real-time Twitter stream. I will no longer trust a single tweet. I will need to check each one, and ask myself if it is a spam, or actual content. At least in a magazine or newspaper I am able to visually separate ads from content quite easily, but on Twitter I will have to mentally process each item to determine which are real and which are spam. At that point the stream is truly worthless.

Project out another 12-24 months as others follow Mr. Messina’s example. If nothing is done Twitter will be well on its way to officially becoming little more than a voluntary spam network where you can choose to consume spam, or simply not use it.

At Nambu, after we exit private beta in late February with our 2.0 re-release, we will be following up with a steady stream of new features to try and combat this problem, and others related to it. Stay tuned.

I am posting this on the Nambu blog because I feel that this problem threatens Nambu as an improving social messaging client. It threatens all Twitter clients and the entire Twitter ecosystem, but only the mothership can save us. I hope she does, but I see no evidence that within Twitter this is seen as a problem. My intention here is to stoke a wider conversation on this issue. Hopefully others with larger followings and better connections can effect some change in policy and strategy within the platform (as Twitter tends to just ignore me). Without change at the center, I currently don’t see how this problem ever gets solved before it is too late.

All feedback is welcome. You can follow Nambu at @nambucom and me, Eric Woodward, at @ejwc.

My apologies to Chris Messina. I am not interested in highlighting him on purpose. He just happened to recently start tweeting spam, and is someone that I want to follow but can’t anymore because he spams us.

As most regular Twitter users know by now, in the second half of last year Twitter added an official retweet to its platform with a reasonable explanation. Its official version essentially adds an unaltered tweet from someone you follow into the timelines of people that follow you, if they do not follow that user already. You can’t edit it.

But a lot of users hate both ends of this addition: they want to add comments to a tweet like the now officially deprecated retweet method, and many don’t even want to see any official retweets in their main timeline at all. They rightly argue they don’t follow those people for a reason, but do follow the people that added comments.

Not everyone hates it, of course, but enough do such that keeping the old retweet alive has caused a terminology problem that is not going away. See above. To even talk about the difference I have to constantly attach a qualifier to “retweet”. Without it you have no idea which one I am referring to. For the record, I prefer the new retweet to the old one, but only because of user icon confusion, seeing one user icon but the tweet of another person next to it.

In the current version of Nambu I offer both options, with a small experiment. I updated Retweet to the official retweet using the new API method, and relabeled the old retweet “Forward”, while not changing its implementation at all. This was largely a failure: Forward means nothing on Twitter and users don’t see it (for the most part) when looking for the “retweet” action option.

To make matters even worse in this regard, some clients offer a Quote Tweet option which uses /via or @via, yet another convention, an updated version of the old retweet that gets rid of the visually horrible RT. Others will name the RT convention something else to differentiate or to avoid two options labeled Retweet (like me earlier this month), or have two options with “Retweet” with different qualifiers like “old”, “traditional” or “RT”. Yuck!

And so I am formally asking Twitter: please, please formalize the terminology around retweets so all clients can implement a common terminology, and standardize it across the platform. The terminology around retweets in the three forms that now exist is a mess. Twitter, please address this, as only you can. Start a small set of implementation guidelines that specify some minimal preferred implementation suggestions and terminology for major features. Any developer that matters will follow them for the benefit of everyone as we all switch from client to client and from device to device.

Twitter needs to show leadership here, and not ignore the issue hoping users let go of RT. They won’t. I even spoke to one user recently that said she will never use the new retweet because she does not want anything but the account’s own image showing up next to whatever she tweets on behalf of clients, period. A lot of people simply hate the new retweet, won’t use it, and nothing can be done about it.

As a client developer without a blessed status within the ecosystem or regular visits to @twitter HQ, I am just a powerless cog in the Twitter machine (as it pertains to Nambu just being a Twitter client), and can do little on my own here. But I do care about the Twitter UX overall, and not just within Nambu. A better Twitter experience based on true attention to detail means more Twitter users for everyone.

But for now I have given up the good fight on this one. In the current development version of Nambu we have already changed the options to “Retweet” and “Traditional Retweet,” while adding a third for “Quote Tweet” with /via or @via. Ugh. The users are left to fend for themselves on this one, but it is not my doing. Let’s solve it, please.

All feedback is welcome. You can follow Nambu at @nambucom and me at @ejwc.

As anyone that has been following Nambu knows, 2009 was not a great year. When we released the initial 1.2.x versions in the Spring of 2009, Nambu was well received. Unfortunately, we were not able to maintain that early momentum. Developer incompetence, poor management and partner infighting made it impossible to follow through on that initial bump of interest and adoption.

Now in early 2010, Nambu has been reborn with a smaller team under new project management. We are moving forward with a rapidly improving private beta version that we will soon re-release for free public downloads. I feel that Nambu can still become the premier dashboard on OS X for real-time activity streams, not only from Twitter, but Facebook and others too.

Within a few months we will leave private beta. Awesome and extensive Facebook support, filtering, approximately 25 localizations, and elegant coordination with all major real-time services will be our focus for 2010 as we move forward aggressively without any of the problems that thwarted our initial releases. I want to add full support for other services like Facebook and others, yet maintain interface simplicity and ease-of-use for those that are only interested in Twitter or Facebook, laying more complex features beyond immediate view. This takes time.

For sure, we still have lots of work to complete for Twitter: conversations, columns, user details, and tons of smaller feature additions. We still have a small round of user interface improvements.

We will make a few mistakes along the way. We tend to develop and update Nambu the way websites are developed: continuously. But this means that you will see us change some things based on feedback and our own usage after the fact and openly experiment, especially while still under private beta.

I will start to expand the private beta significantly after the next update, tentatively scheduled for later this month. This next update will finalize a lot of the application menus, shortcuts and user interface, and include some performance and scrolling optimizations. Nambu is almost ready to live in public once again.

And Nambu for the iPhone? I simply have nothing to say about that as this time, sorry. Stay tuned for more announcements.

As anyone can imagine, the easiest thing to do with a mess of a startup is walk away. I and others involved almost did that. But I believed, and still believe, that there is a huge vacuum of quality on OS X for consuming real-time streams in a familiar and native user interface on the desktop, where it belongs. More than ever, Nambu aims to fill that vacuum as a free service.

All feedback is welcome. You can follow Nambu at @nambucom and me at @ejwc.